Education
Ph.D History, University of Hawai`i at Manoa, 1999
M.A. Anthropology, University of Hawai`i at Manoa, 1993
B.A. Anthropology, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1990
Biography
Rainer F. Buschmann is a professor of History in the Faculty Early Retirement Program at the California State University, Channel Islands (CI). His training in anthropology stirred a passion for oceanic settings, which took him to Hawai`i (where he obtained his M.A. in anthropology and his Ph.D. in history) and, ultimately, the California Channel Islands. He has formerly taught at Hawai`i Pacific University and Purdue University. At CI, he was a founding faculty member of the history program, contributing to a curriculum that actively emphasizes global history. He has held visiting fellowships at the Institute of Social Studies at the University of Lisbon and the European Institute of Global Studies at the University of Basel.
His publications examine European perceptions of the Pacific Ocean, aiming to recover the global history of this body of water, a largely understudied area in contemporary scholarship. He is the author of Oceans in World History (McGraw-Hill, 2007), Anthropology's Global Histories: The Ethnographic Frontier in German New Guinea, 1870-1935 (U of Hawai`i Press, 2009), and Iberian Visions of the Pacific Ocean, 1507-1899 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). He has collaborated on Navigating the Spanish Lake: The Pacific in the Iberian World, 1521-1898 (U of Hawai`i Press, 2014) and Exploring Iberian Counterpoints in the Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Pacific (Routledge, 2024). A further collaboration on the environmental history of the Pacific Ocean is under contract. His most recent published monograph is Hoarding New Guinea: Writing Colonial Ethnographic Histories for Post-Colonial Futures (U of Nebraska Press, 2023). He has also co-edited the award-winning Encyclopedia of the World's Oceans (ABC-CLIO 2018), a second edition of which was published in 2025 by Bloomsbury. He also co-edits a publication series entitled Studies in Pacific Worlds issued by the University of Nebraska Press. His latest monograph will explore the interactions between European Empires and the Pacific Islands during the long nineteenth century.
Representative Courses Taught
- HIST 212 World History From 1500
- HIST 319 European History, 1871-1945
- HIST 340 History and Psychology of Nazi Germany
- HIST 365 Themes in World History
- HIST 366 Oceans of World History
- HIST 380 History of the Pacific
- HIST 323 Iberian Global Expansions
- HIST 491 Historiography
- HIST 342 Environmental History
Scholarship
Keywords
World History, History of the Pacific, Oceans and History